Giving by Being Interested

[from the archives]

In my last couple of blogs, I’ve talked about how I addressed my children’s development of false personality and their sin of using their peers to try and get approval and attention for themselves.

I was glad to find my older children able to recognize and stop this sinful relational behavior, but I knew I needed to teach them more about what they needed to do instead. It is good and right to stop sinful behavior, but we also need to learn how to relate rightly in love.

I was already teaching them to treat each other in their close relationships at home with right relating in love, but I want them to know how to treat people outside of our family, even those they’re meeting for the first time, with giving in mind, instead of using and taking.

Whenever my children have the opportunity to relate with people outside of our family, I make sure to talk with them about what it looks like to make an investment of interest in others. If someone is going to visit us, I talk with all the kids about what they know about the visitor before they arrive. Often it is very little. They might know some surface details like who they are in relationship to us or where they live or their names. Then I begin asking my children questions about our guest, “What has she been doing lately? What does she like to do in her spare time? What does she think about what she’s been doing? What is her favorite part of where she’s been?” Of course my children don’t know any of these answers.

I lead my children to realize that they have many questions to ask our visitor, and in asking they need to show their interest in that person. I talk with them about listening to the answers and forming more questions so that they can come to know our guest more and more, and learn what our guests interests are. In this way, they can enter relating with this person in a giving way, instead of being concerned for what they’re going to get from this person by concentrating on how that person thinks of them, or being noticed and paid attention to, or simply retreating into non-involved silence.

It is a skill that takes purposeful effort and practice to develop – asking interested questions and listening to the answers in order to form more interested questions. By making the kids aware of their need to learn how to do this I bring their attention and focus during our visit toward the way I make meaningful conversation. Usually I help my three oldest to form questions that will require more than a “Yes” or “No” answer before our guest arrives. They look for opportunity to ask their question and then attempt to think of another related question based on the answer. I’ll be there to help the conversation move forward, but my kids are aware of what is happening. We are making an investment of interest in our guest and coming to know them.

At the same time I talk with my younger ones about controlling themselves against their urge to talk endlessly about themselves or about what they want to talk about which is usually legos or scenes from movies.

Rachel is naturally quite outgoing so she finds the challenge of making  meaningful conversation more about the skill of coming up with interested questions.

Phillip and Annie, however, are more likely to be reluctant to talk out loud to people they don’t know well. I talk with them about this too. When they remain silent because it is more comfortable for them to do so, they are wrapping the visit around themselves. The visit becomes about their own comfort instead of the investment of coming to know others. They fear what the guest might think of them if they say something odd. Both of them make efforts to overcome their own tendencies by bringing themselves to ask interested questions and talk despite their discomfort. They do this  for the sake of our guest. All the kids have been progressing in their ability.

I’ve met very few adults who know how to be interested in others beyond a few surface details or certain information that they’re trying to get for themselves in order to form judgments, and I’ve never met teenagers besides my own who know how to make meaningful conversation, generously giving toward the development of real relationship. Our culture seems to believe in general that if I talk all about myself and then you talk all about yourself, we’ve had a great conversation and we have the illusion that we know each other when in reality we’re busy giving the impression we want others to have of us, pondering all the while what they are thinking of us.

Jesus came not to take and use others, but to generously give from his depth of unconditional love, and we ought to learn to do the same.

[originally posted September 2010]

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